Hamm: I’ll have called my father and I’ll have called my…(he hesitates)…son. And even twice, or three times, in case they shouldn’t have heard me, the first time, or the second.

Team Players
A family is a team, and a team benefits by communicating effectively. It can be looked up in any playbook about humanity. Dad (1928-1985), coach of our team, communicated disapproval effectively. The blurry figure in the 1958 photo is him in the Louvre, approaching a blurry Winged Victory of Samothrace. He must have picked up disapproval from his coach, Grandpa (1892-1971). Uncle Bob, married to one of Dad’s two sisters, was the affable putting or third-base coach who was not responsible for do-or-die strategy. Uncle Albert (1933-2005) lived in Manhattan, employed as a floor finisher, the same profession as his father. Scouting reports have not uncovered why he lived in Manhattan. The team did not see him during visits to my mother’s All-Star sister on the Upper West Side, and I did not think to look up my uncle while I was at NYU; we might have crossed paths without realizing it as his last known address was in the East Village. Albert, for his part, seldom returned to home field—or home ice as the case might be (Pittsburgh PA gets cold!)—and was moreover estranged from Dad. It remains a mystery whether Albert discovered anything in the Big Apple of strategic value to himself or the team. He suffered from mental illness to some degree. One unverified story: He spent periods on the street. Fact: Upon his death in 2005 many years after his father and brother, a benefactor paid for his remains to be transported home for burial.

Dad’s team, co-managed by Mom, numbered four boys. Our training was typical for suburban America. Sports had society’s stamp of approval, but Dad withdrew his support after schoolwork became less important to me than soccer. For him, Ideal Sports Shop, which succeeded candy stores as my “drug” supplier, was where time and money went to die.

Playing Conditions

“…waves of layoffs and plant closures [ ] characterized the decade from 1975 to 1985—a period in which the region lost, by one estimate, 150,000 manufacturing jobs.

In 1976, the poverty rate in the Pittsburgh area was 6.7 percent; by 1983, it had more than doubled to 13.8 percent. When the unemployment rate in 1983 [ ] peaked at 17 percent overall, it reached a Depression-like 25.6 percent for Black workers.

Between 1980 and 1990, the metropolitan population shrank by 179,725…Detroit—the next-largest source of domestic emigration—lost half as many people in the same time, out of a population 70 percent larger than Pittsburgh’s…from 1980 to 1985, more than 70 percent of net migration was among those under 29.

Pittsburgh’s health care system in the late 1970s and early 1980s remained the institutional product of the postwar welfare state, stamped by the social power and communitarian values of the organized industrial working class…the decline of steel and the aging of the population had expanded this market, and, in a concrete continuation of the gendered division of labor and caregiving culture…the women who staffed these services had been pulled into the labor market by the loss of steel wages and the growth of hospitals.

The average annual rate of hospital inflation had been 15 percent from 1978 to 1982, but, beginning in mid-1984, fell to 2.4 percent—its lowest level in two decades…The eight metropolitan teaching hospitals enjoyed an average net operating margin of 4.6 percent, compared with the twenty-two nonurban, nonteaching hospitals, averaging -1.9 percent.

With communities aging and unwaged family care increasingly unavailable as women went to work, the pressure to warehouse the huge elderly population intensified.

The prestigious medical center promised significant administrative savings and market advantages to any institution that joined it—and tacitly, bankruptcy for those that refused.

As consolidation took hold in one sector of the industry, other sectors were compelled to follow. In 1995, Blue Cross of Pennsylvania began the process of merging with Blue Shield, which covered medical (as opposed to hospital) bills…Now facing a consolidated insurer, hospital giant UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) in turn invaded the insurance market, launching its own insurance company subsidiary…

The structural transformation of the health industry in the 1980s and 1990s produced a vast, marginalized workforce concentrated at the bottom of the hospital hierarchy and outside hospitals entirely, in nursing homes and private residences. This workforce, partly demarcated by race and partly by gender, was responsible for delivering a growing portion of the care that sustained the everyday survival of the patient population—as opposed to the intensive interventions that sustained hospital profits.”

On the Sidelines

Pep Talks

Post-Game Interview

Welcome to Ideal Sports, little man! How are we doing today? Your allowance won’t get you far here.

Today, as an adult, I should be able to resist a mannequin’s sales pitch addressed to me from a b/w photograph of the Ideal storefront which was found in a box of memorabilia. Mannequins are not normally authorized to engage with customers, yet my counterpart has its say in neutral tones and does not wear the contrived game face of sales agents in real-estate ads in back issues of the community magazine from the same box. Indeed, lo and behold, the ghostly dummy/mummy has picked up life skills during its interment with fellow memorabilia. Its area of expertise extends way beyond the latest shoes. It answers riddles.

Valentine, or Val, your grandfather, a German immigrant and respected floor finisher/carpenter, must have been proud that Karl, his first-born, had become a doctor, but Karl, who turned out taciturn like his father, was not put on a pedestal. Albert, who may have disagreed, feeling like a scrub compared to his brother, followed in his father’s occupational footsteps, yet left town to make his own way, which suggests the team had internal rivalries…Remember the few times Dad took you to his practice? It wasn’t to give a guided tour, including introductions to a secretary and patients. The visits were on weekends, you were in and out in minutes. For one of his birthdays, you gambled on a Nixon biography (Dad may have been a Republican), which he did not read. Serious news was not discussed in your house; your father called politicians “backslappers”—end of story. As a teen, you asked him to show you the hospital where he worked; Doctor Karl replied that you could go to any hospital on your own. You never met, or heard about, a single friend; and he and your mother did not have mutual friends, nor did they host parties or go to them like other parents, though your mother was an outgoing lady. Dad did try with his boys, taking you to camp, swim, fish, to Pirates and Pens games, to par-3 golf and the driving range, to restaurants and—no eye-rolling!—Catholic Mass, the last two with Mom. The most ambitious experiment in male bonding: All the “men” went off to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, with a stop in Toronto. Dad did not explain the boycott by African nations. Let’s not forget the awkwardness caused by his custom of watching your soccer games from the opposite side of the field rather than sitting with your mother and the rest of the parents. His presence nevertheless was proof of interest in your welfare, even as, slowly but surely, Karl effectively resigned as coach. He gave no career advice, no heart-to-heart about sex. In his defense, nobody wins at everything and he was suffering marital and business losses.

three cheers
Paul Auster, Portrait of an Invisible Man (1982)
Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (2021)

image credits
Winged Victory (Paris) and Coliseum (Rome): Eleanor Hohman
Ideal Sports: Historical Society of Mt. Lebanon (PA)

epigraph
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1957)